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A whole generation has grown up with computers and cable, VCRs and voicemail. It's not surprising that a brand-new culture has blossomed--with its own jargon, its own style, and its own definition of fun. This is a full-color treasury of brain candy, eyeball kicks, and reality hacking projects, with tips on everything from joyriding on the information superhighway to running your car on kitchen grease.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the wrong hands, this book would receive a dousing of gasoline and a quick flick of the Bic. In the right hands, this is a delightfully subversive manual for a lifetime of fun.

This is the do-it-yourself handbook for enjoying our media-saturated world by tinkering with how it works. Pulls together the kookiest and most engaging ideas from the Internet, great suggestions on "culture jamming" (a practice of co-opting the resources, messages, and brain-washing machinery of existing media, pioneered by Adbusters magazine), and generally jam-packed with loads of fun ideas and funny material.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Do you laugh at authority, enjoy silly putty, get a kick outta kitsch, appreciate goofy pranks, take pride in being a do-it-yourselfer? Do your knees get weak over Water Wiennies, Sea Monkeys, Crazy Straws, or Esquivel? If you answered "yes" to a few or more of these then you are probably a happy mutant and this book is for you.It's great. You'll find tips on building hacking, how to do "your" work while appearing to be doing "their" work, turning the tables on telemarketers, creating your own personal anti-marketing strategy, getting your zine seen, and The Urban Absurdist Survival Kit which offers official looking signs you can copy and stick around to confuse and amuse. It also includes character profiles of idiots you are likely to run into on the net, conveniently printed up as cards to cut out and keep handy for quick identification. Plus, articles on Ivan Stang, Roger Corman, Jim Ludtke, and Patch Adams (oooh, even scarier than Robin Williams).Get your giggles off while undermining the Man. But, this book isn't all just fun and games, it contains a degree of seriousness, yet it is also serious fun. *The Happy Mutant Handbook* possesses teeth but when it nips it aims for the funny bone.Buy this book, read it, play with it, give it a hug. You two kids could become really good friends.

Everything from prank calls, odd types of hacking, and Wham-o products to strange but simple foods, comix, and the Happy Mutant Hall of Fame, the Happy Mutant Handbook has most everything that the other 10% of the human population, who aren't Normals, could want to know. There are lots of fun little pranks that can always be used. One is standing in an elevator and giggling the entire time you're reading the phone book. It's quite entertaining and your able to read it again and again, each time knowing that there are actually other people like you out there. If there weren't this book wouldn't exist. So worship it and read it.

What appears to be, at first, a critique on pop culture, is instead a guidebook to subverting the dominant paradigm. Make your own diesel fuel. Start a newsletter. Adapt technology for more "creative" uses. Create your own conspiracy. This is one of the few books that actually make you want to go out and do something after you read it (or in my case, WHILE you read it). Highly, highly recomended. This might become the STEAL THIS BOOK of the 90's!

When I first read it, I had never before heard of the Cacophony Society, bOING bOING magazine, the Billboard Liberation Front or Burning Man, and I had no idea what "culture jamming" was. But my eyes were opened, and my life has gone all *kinds* of strange and wonderful new directions, all because of the resources in this incredible little book.

It's a damn shame it's out of print, but it's howling for a sequel. How about it, Carla?

No one seemd to get it. We would rampage the streets frightening the impressionable, and disturbing the normal. We all thought that we were loose cannons without a name. Now we have names. We are Happy Mutants. We delight in the wonderful weirdness, and dark back-coners of culture. This new wonderful book (no assembly required) will allow your inherent whimsey rise to the surface and awaken a bizarrity that you never knew existed. The new hobbies, activites, and general attitudes presented within will tickle your uvula, and leave you standing in the humidifying mist of the Gods

This book has warped my brain. Well, warped it more than it wasalready. When walking to work the morning after I finished it, I foundmyself wondering how the mannequins in the department store windows would look with mustaches. And listing creative ways to make the tourists (can't believe they're here *already*) nervous. And thinking that my own guide to life is just what the world needs right now.The opening chapter is right: if you're the sort of person who finds comfort in authority, or if you think that spray-painting a huge "A" on one of the Space Needle stanchions is any way to express your individuality, this book will either change your life or make you very, very scared.For everyone else, this book is a fun, inspiring guide to building a cultural phenomenon on your own sense of the absurd. What greater goal in life could there be?

There is a ton of fun in here if you really are the type of person that this book was written for. And if you are that type of person, you will have the time of your life with the stuff contained between its covers. But beware, you will eventually get caught :)